Driving into northeast Arkansas from up North for the first time more than 30 years ago, I thought the scenery seemed familiar, but it took me a while to realize just how close I was to home. I hadn’t been back to northeast Hungary in almost 20 years, having fled the country with my family in 1956 as a child, just ahead of Soviet tanks, and grown up in Chicago, which wasn’t like Hungary at all.
But Arkansas is a lot like Hungary. They’re about the same size, and if you could push the top down a little and widen the sides on a map, Hungary would look just like Arkansas. Both have hills, but in opposite corners, and are mostly flat, and even Arkansas’s history of occupation after the Civil War reminded me of Hungary’s subjugation for much of the 20th century.
Arkansans and Hungarians have something else in common: They speak languages that are unlike anything else in the world, which is part of their charm.
But there were no tanks in the streets when we arrived here, or mass transports to concentration camps, where my parents’ family perished during the Second World War. The license plates proclaimed, “Land of Opportunity.”
After a couple of jobs with Arkansas newspapers, we headed for Van Buren, where we ran the Press Argus, the oldest weekly newspaper west of the Mississippi.
The paper started before the Civil War, but when Union troops occupied the city, they threw the presses into the Arkansas River, although the resourceful publisher managed to get a paper out printed on wallpaper, or so I heard.
Not too many Hungarian-born journalists move west of the Mississippi River and become newspaper publishers. That’s because English is usually our third or fourth language, which puts us at a bit of a disadvantage. But Joseph Pulitzer overcame that handicap and went into business for himself in St. Louis and did well and has a prize named after him, so, sure, he was a bit of an inspiration. Newcomers emulate illustrious immigrants who came before them — Indians come here and often follow other Patels into the hospitality business — and sweat can be a sizeable down payment when you haven’t got much else going for you but hope.
We’ve had The Leader in Jacksonville for 20 years and serve three counties in a growing area. The paper has more than doubled its circulation, and even though the Internet has hit big-city newspapers hard, there will always be a need for local journalism. Our reporters cover the region in depth, and their stories aren’t found on the Internet, unless you go to our web site, where we put up some of our content, which the Little Rock TV stations often swipe as soon as it’s posted.
Newspapers have faced challenges since their beginnings — from authoritarian rulers to occupying armies to new media such as TV, radio and the Internet — but we manage to survive because the news must get out, or the public won’t know how their school district compares with the rest of the state, or who’s ripping them off or making backroom deals.
Journalism in Arkansas can be as good as anywhere in the country. You can write about past and future presidents, sit down with the perpetrators of the Central High crisis years later in a small dining room at a North Little Rock hotel (where Orval Faubus and Jim Johnson hardly talked to each other), write about one of worst Superfund sites in the nation (the old Vertac chemical plant in Jacksonville, which was cleaned up just before Superfund ran out of money), cover one of the longest-running school desegregation cases in the country (the Pulaski County Special School District), and, more happily, write about Little Rock Air Force Base, which is really in Jacksonville. The service’s forerunner, the Army Air Corps, saved my mother’s life when she was a slave laborer in Germany as they bombed the Nazis into submission. (I met those airmen at the air base about a decade ago.) Black American soldiers liberated my late father at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. When I asked him what was their reaction when they went into the camp, he said, “They wept.”
As I write, I’ve been listening to Bela Bartok’s 100-year-old field recordings of Hungarian folk music made in the villages not far from where I was born. As I listen to the haunting music, it reminds me of the blues that poor blacks created a century ago along the Mississippi Delta. It occurred to me why I love the blues: Like so much about Arkansas, it also reminds me of home.
— Garrick Feldman
